Cardboard Skyline

Luke began with the smallest box and worked his way toward the impossible one. The rhythm established itself quickly — lift, carry, cross, deposit, return — each circuit a transit between realities that was already losing its capacity to astonish and acquiring instead the texture of labour. His arms protested after the third trip. By the fifth, his shoulders had joined the complaint. Sweat gathered at his hairline, cooling each time he stepped into the desert's dry air and prickling when he returned to the house.

The pile grew in the ochre sand near the portal's threshold. Boxes leaned against each other at angles that defied orderly stacking, their shipping labels and barcodes absurd against the landscape — manufactured objects from a manufactured world deposited on ground that had never known human presence before his footprints arrived. Brown corrugation accumulating into something that resembled, from certain angles, a small skyline. A cardboard settlement rising from nothing.

Each crossing carried its own weight beyond the physical. Every box that landed in the dust was a declaration that Luke was not content to be a tourist in this place, passing through without leaving trace. He was importing. Committing. Building a bridge between worlds measured not in light or physics but in the stubborn accumulation of material carried through by hand.

The final box waited in the living room like a challenge. It was the largest — the main tent structure, the kind of carton that belonged on a trolley rather than in the arms of a man who hadn't seen the inside of a gym in years. His first attempt to lift it produced nothing but a shift of perhaps an inch and a laugh that was breathless and slightly bitter. The box settled back into the carpet with quiet contempt.

He found the thin blue plastic strap at its middle and dragged instead. The cardboard scraped across carpet and down the hallway, each inch a negotiation between his stubbornness and his spine's increasingly formal complaints. He bumped walls. He stopped to shake feeling back into his fingers. The hallway stretched ahead like something personal, and the box fought him the entire way.

It crossed the portal's threshold with a tumble and landed in the sand with a thump that sent a plume of dust curling upward. Luke followed it through on legs that barely held him and stood surveying what he had created.

The pile had become something more than scattered cargo. Cardboard walls rose from orange sand, casting shadows, blocking wind, occupying space that had been empty since the beginning of whatever counted as time in this dimension. It was messy and ridiculous and it was the most substantial thing Luke had ever built. Not with elegance or efficiency — just with will, with the refusal to leave the job incomplete.

His gaze settled on the glossy print visible on the largest box — a photograph of the assembled tent. Canvas walls rising to a peaked roof. Wide awnings creating sheltered space. A structure designed to hold ten people, to become the centre of a camp, to shelter more than one man's solitary wandering. The image struck him with unexpected force.

He had bought this on impulse, thinking only of adventure beneath alien skies. But standing in the desert light, sore and flushed and trembling with exertion, he saw something larger in the photograph. A prototype. A beginning. The first structure in what might eventually become a settlement — something that included other people, something that outlasted his individual presence. The word community surfaced in his mind with a weight that surprised him.

The time for solitary discovery was ending. What came next would be richer, messier, more complicated in ways he could not predict. Jamie and Paul would bring their own questions, their own reactions, their own ways of seeing. The wonder of this place would either multiply when shared or diminish under the pressure of other eyes. There was no way to know which without the risk.

Luke stepped back through the portal and closed it with a thought. The colours folded inward and vanished. The wall returned to plaster and paint. He released the dogs from the bedroom, knelt in the hallway, and let their uncomplicated warmth wash through him while the last echoes of Clivilius faded from his skin.